Timeline: A brief history of the Sagebrush Rebellionhttps://www.hcn.org/articles/a-history-of-the-sagebrush-rebellion
An interactive, year-by-year look at the current insurgency.The current wave of tension between federal government and a growing network of militants in Western states has roots dating back over a hundred years, to white settlers arriving in the region. Our timeline here begins with the emergence of the modern Sagebrush Rebellion, in the 1970s. Explore the timeline to learn more about this history.

This article originally appeared online Feb. 4, 2016. It has been updated with more recent outbreaks of the Sagebrush Rebellion.

]]>No publisherSagebrush RebellionInfographicGunsHistoryRanchingAgriculturePoliticsNot on homepagePublic LandsState Government2018/01/17 12:20:00 GMT-7ArticleWill a twice-burned county change its ways?https://www.hcn.org/issues/48.22/will-a-twice-burned-county-change-its-ways
Don’t count on wildfires to alter how counties plan development in fire-prone zones.Minutes after Jeff Burrows noticed a puff of smoke rising from Roaring Lion Canyon, on Sunday afternoon, July 31, his dispatch radio crackled. The volunteer firefighter raced to the station in Hamilton, Montana, suited up, and awaited orders as fire chiefs scouted the blaze on the Bitterroot National Forest. By the time he sped up Roaring Lion Road toward his home and hopped off the fire truck to help his wife and two kids evacuate, the fire, fueled by tinder-dry conditions and 30-plus mph winds, had already blown up.

“I’ve never seen fire move that fast before,” Burrows says. His house was spared, but others were not: In its first hours, the Roaring Lion Fire destroyed 16 homes and dozens of outbuildings. Burrows worked the fireline until 1 a.m., hauling hose through smoke so thick it obscured all light except that of flame and falling embers. The next morning, as Forest Service hotshot crews, water-dumping helicopters and bulldozers attacked the flames, he went back, exhausted, to his regular job as a Ravalli County commissioner.

Roaring Lion isn’t the worst wildfire to strike Ravalli County, where the small towns and scattered homes of the Bitterroot Valley abut the national forest boundary. In 2000, a 356,000-acre fire complex — the nation’s biggest during an exceptionally destructive wildfire season — charred 70 homes here. The damage helped spur county commissioners and others to adopt some measures to reduce communities’ wildfire risk, including tree-thinning projects that later helped save homes from the Roaring Lion Fire.

But from the time the smoke cleared in 2000 to the eruption of this July’s inferno — a period during which Ravalli County residents were evacuated at least a half-dozen times because of major blazes — local officials have largely resisted regulatory tools, including subdivision requirements and zoning, that could steer development out of fire-prone areas and make existing properties more fire-resistant. In 2000, for example, the county planning board drafted detailed subdivision standards to reduce wildfire risk, but commissioners refused to adopt them on ideological grounds. As retired forest supervisor Sonny LaSalle, who was then on the planning board, says, “The private-property rights issue drives a lot of the politics in this county.”

Ravalli County isn’t alone in its unwillingness to rein in development in the increasingly flammable wildland-urban interface (or WUI, pronounced WOO-ee). According to researchers at Headwaters Economics, a Bozeman, Montana-based nonprofit, most Western counties, whatever their politics, generally allow risky home construction. This, in turn, puts a growing burden on the U.S. Forest Service, which bears the brunt of the region’s firefighting costs. In 2015, the agency spent more than half its $6.5 billion budget on wildfire-related activities, largely because of pressure to defend private property.

Counties and other local governments “are absolutely central” to containing those costs, says Ray Rasker, Headwaters executive director. But “it’s very rare, at the end of a fire, that a community concludes that it should have better land-use planning.”

Will the Roaring Lion Fire change anything? “This one struck really close to home,” says Burrows. “I do hope we’re going to learn from these losses.”

Anita Andre sifts through the ashes of her garage, which was burned down by the Roaring Lion Fire in Ravalli County, Montana. Fortunately her house, set in 30 acres of ponderosa pine forest, survived, perhaps due to the green grass surrounding it.

Perry Backus/Ravalli Republic

In the aftermath of the 2000 fire season, Western counties were pushed to get more aggressive about fireproofing their communities. Federal lands agencies created a National Fire Plan to better coordinate wildfire efforts with state and local governments. The plan spurred Bitter Root Resource Conservation and Development, a Hamilton-based nonprofit, to begin assisting landowners in Ravalli and two neighboring counties to thin trees and other vegetation on their properties. Nearly 650 Ravalli landowners have since done so.

Then, following another destructive fire season in 2002, Congress passed the Healthy Forests Restoration Act of 2003, which among other things incentivized local governments to adopt “community wildfire protection plans.” When Bitter Root RC&D brought together federal, state and county officials to draft such a plan for Ravalli County, county commissioners endorsed many local initiatives, including prioritizing thinning projects on certain private lands. The plan even succeeded in getting the county to mention “defensible space” — created by clearing vegetation away from homes — in its comprehensive planning document, or growth policy. But it didn’t lead to any regulations discouraging further development in the WUI.

The county appeared ready to get more aggressive in 2007, when Ravalli-area legislators helped pass a state bill requiring all Montana counties to consider wildfire risk in their growth policies and subdivision regulations. Meanwhile, pro-planning leaders, concerned about Ravalli County’s rapid population growth — from 1990 to 2010 it grew 60 percent, to a population of 40,000 — proposed county-wide zoning that could have been a powerful tool for regulating development in the WUI. But in 2008, the anti-planning forces mounted a citizen ballot initiative to entirely repeal the county’s growth policy, a prerequisite for zoning under Montana law. And they won.

Another state bill, in 2009, required counties to map their WUI areas. But even creating a map proved controversial. Bitter Root RC&D partnered with the county’s 13 rural fire districts, the county sheriff and other local officials, plus GIS and fire behavior experts, to produce a detailed map of Ravalli County’s WUI. But in 2011, under pressure from residents afraid that the map would lead to higher insurance premiums or more regulations, the county commission refused to adopt it.

When Byron Bonney, a retired Forest Service firefighter who has led Bitter Root RC&D’s wildfire work since 2001, complained to the state that the county lacked a decent WUI map, Montana officials backed the county, he says. “They didn’t want the controversy.”

It’s unlikely that better maps or stronger regulations would have spared many homes from Roaring Lion’s wrath. Most were built in the 1980s or before, so even using zoning to make the WUI off-limits to development wouldn’t have helped. According to Ravalli County planning director Terry Nelson, more recent housing development, both in the Roaring Lion area and across the county, has occurred mostly on existing lots or on parcels created with exemptions from Ravalli’s subdivision regulations, which require on-site water storage, firefighter access and defensible space.

But a thinning and logging project called the Westside Collaborative Vegetation Management Project might have made a major difference if it had been completed prior to the July blowup. The project was scheduled to treat national forest along roughly six miles of the WUI in the Roaring Lion area beginning this fall. Local environmentalists and other residents raised concerns about road-building and truck traffic, largely because the project includes a commercial timber sale intended to help pay for unprofitable hand-thinning. Commissioners, including Burrows, who was elected in 2012, cite the project’s years-long approval process as evidence that the Forest Service is unacceptably burdened with regulations. But they also objected because the project would decommission some forest roads they’d like to see remain open.

Byron Bonney surveys the damage done by the Roaring Lion Fire. The forest fuel treatments that Bonney has administered for Bitter Root Resource, Conservation & Development helped to spare several residences from the flames, but 16 homes, including some that received the fuel treatments, were destroyed.

Marshall Swearingen

For Burrows, the main lesson of Roaring Lion is that more trees should be cut on public land to reduce its flammability — a popular stance in a county with a dying timber industry. Other commissioners agree. But the Forest Service hasn’t been idle. In addition to monitoring or suppressing more than 200 sizeable wildfires in and around Ravalli County since 2000, it has logged, thinned or performed prescribed burns on more than 120,000 acres of public land, arguably treating the majority of the WUI yet uncharred by wildfire.

Yet the commissioners propose no reciprocal county action on private lands, other than encouraging tree-thinning and fire-resistant construction by willing landowners. “Our citizens have been very clear that they don’t want more regulation,” says Greg Chilcott, a Ravalli County commissioner who was first elected in 2002.

For Rasker, whose Headwaters Economics has partnered with several Western cities and counties, including nearby Missoula County, to evaluate and plan for wildfire risk, the behavior of local governments like Ravalli County reflects out-of-kilter economic incentives. What motivates most counties “is their budgets,” he says. Counties reap property taxes when they permit development, yet pay little of the cost to defend homes from wildfire. The Roaring Lion Fire took a toll on Burrows and other volunteer first-responders, but Ravalli County will pay essentially none of the $11 million cost associated with the weeks-long containment effort that followed. (According to a preliminary agreement among the firefighting entities involved, the Forest Service will foot at least 75 percent of the bill; the state is eligible for federal disaster funds to cover much of the remainder.)

Counties like Ravalli — whose total annual budget is $46 million — would almost certainly change their view toward fire-prone development if they had to pay a major share of those costs, or if they were financially rewarded for restricting that kind of development, Rasker says. “It’s not until that happens that we’ll see any change.”

Major reform is unlikely to occur anytime soon. But that didn’t stop Bonney from contemplating his next visit with Ravalli commissioners as he surveyed the wreckage of the 8,500-acre Roaring Lion Fire, still smoldering on high slopes in mid-August. The fire destroyed seven homes that had received thinning treatment through Bitter Root RC&D’s grant program. But others survived despite no initial aid from firefighters, owing to fire-resistant building methods and the vegetation treatments, plus a bit of luck, Bonney says.

He’d like commissioners to learn from that, and to seriously consider updating subdivision and building material requirements. Roughly 80 percent of Ravalli County’s WUI is still undeveloped, so new policies could make a major difference.

Will Burrows and other county officials act on his proposals? “Who knows?” Bonney says. “Those things have been on the table for a long time.”

]]>No publisherWildfireMontanaGrowth & SustainabilityEconomyPoliticsWeatherNot on homepage2016/10/24 02:00:00 GMT-6ArticleScientists dig up the past in packrat middenshttps://www.hcn.org/issues/48.3/scientists-dig-up-the-past-in-packrat-middens
The animals’ sturdy nests can preserve clues about the climate for 50,000 years or more.On a bright, late-summer day in southwest Montana, Julio Betancourt gazes through binoculars across a dry slope rimmed by limestone cliffs. A cave-like divot in the rock catches his attention.

“I see middens,” he says, meaning packrat middens — the nests that the long-tailed nocturnal rodents construct with material from trees and other vegetation. Excited, he uses a technical term: “I can actually see the amberat.”

For Betancourt, a U.S. Geological Survey senior scientist who studies climate variability and ecological change, middens provide a window into the past. Packrats drink no water, but produce a viscous plant-derived urine, which they excrete on their nests. When this dries, it forms amberat — an asphalt-like crust that can preserve plant material for tens of thousands of years. A well-preserved midden is a snapshot of plant communities from as far back as the last ice age.

Over the past decades, Betancourt has chiseled samples from hundreds of middens, some more than 50,000 years old. Back then, glaciers were scouring Western mountain ranges, global temperatures were several degrees cooler, and familiar trees like ponderosa pine hadn’t yet spread across the West. By noting middens’ age and location, scientists can map how plant species migrated as the ice age transitioned, starting around 12,000 years ago, to the warmer, arid climate of the modern West.

Now, middens may help us understand how plant communities will respond to human-caused climate change. “Most places in the world lack the detailed historical knowledge that middens provide here,” says Betancourt. “We’re damn lucky” to have them.

In 1979, Julio Betancourt holds a midden he collected from a cliff in New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon.

Courtesy Julio Betancourt

In 1961, two scientists studying the biological effects of nuclear detonations at the Nevada Test Site climbed a nearby mountain. They were surprised to find no juniper trees on top, but spotted what turned out to be a midden — full of juniper twigs. Radiocarbon dating pegged the twigs at about 10,000 years old.

The duo later found other middens as old as 40,000 years in the area. When they published their conclusion that juniper had climbed the area’s mountains and then vanished as the climate became warmer and drier, they mentioned the middens’ “peculiar varnish-like coating” and noted that they may hold “unique value” in the study of ancient climate.

Scientists began poking around rock crannies in the Sonoran and Mohave deserts, the Great Basin and the Grand Canyon, using the middens they found to plot the spread of plant species across the landscape in the wake of the most recent ice age. Betancourt and others charted the northward march of ponderosa and the spread of piñon-juniper forests to the Colorado Plateau.

Although a modern-day forest may look ancient, “there’s a lot of instability,” says Betancourt. Generally, the midden record shows some plant species invading while others retreat, not only in rhythm with broad climatic trends but also with acute droughts and wet periods.

For example, Utah juniper jumped suddenly from southern Wyoming into Montana during a two-millennia dry period beginning around 7,500 years ago, stalled during a wet spell, then backfilled as the climate again began drying 2,800 years ago. Similarly, piñon pine leaped 25 miles to Dutch John Mountain on the Utah-Wyoming border around the year 1200, hung on during a decades-long drought that killed most of the long-dominant juniper, and finally took over during the wetter 1300s.

Such ecological elasticity is reason for “cautious optimism” as climate change likely brings a new scale of drought and other disturbance, says Stephen Jackson, who heads the U.S. Geological Survey’s Southwest Climate Science Center. “We know that with enough time, species can migrate” to areas with suitable climate, rather than perish, and that even small populations like the Dutch John Mountain piñons can weather severe drought and spring back.

But, Jackson adds, the accelerating pace of climate change may mean that plant species “aren’t necessarily going to have those decades or centuries to make the adjustment.” He and Betancourt, teaming up on a study published last November, estimate that a widespread Western subspecies of ponderosa could lose half its current habitat by 2060 due to warming. They suggest one possible solution: deliberately translocating it to places — such as farther north in Canada — where it is more likely to endure future climate, with past climate-driven jumps helping to identify those areas.

Back in Montana, Betancourt continues his midden hunt. By midday, we’ve found a few gamey middens, none with the promising crust of old age. As if for a consolation prize, Betancourt pulls out several baggies of duff-like plant material from his luggage — ice-age midden matter, washed of the amberat. As a passerby eyes us suspiciously, Betancourt opens one and assures me that ice-age samples such as this one smell of Pinesol. I inhale deeply, imagine future juniper flowing across these foothills. Packrats will surely glean those trees’ twigs, caching a story yet to be told.

]]>No publisherNew ResearchClimate ChangeWildlifeScientific Research2016/02/22 03:10:00 GMT-7ArticleThe BLM’s arms race on the rangehttps://www.hcn.org/issues/48.2/the-blms-arms-race-on-the-range
The agency has armed up since 1978, but it’s still outgunned without local backup.

Bureau of Land Management rangers stand guard as protesters gather at the gate of the BLM’s Bunkerville base camp after the roundup of some of Cliven Bundy’s cattle from public land in April 2014.

Jim Urquhart/Reuters

In 2012, Steve Martin, an Arizona-based special agent for the federal Bureau of Land Management, sat in a briefing room at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Artesia, New Mexico, listening to the details of a clandestine operation his agency was planning in the Nevada desert. The goal seemed commendable — to round up rancher Cliven Bundy’s cattle, which had been grazing illegally on public land for decades — but he thought the approach seemed off. The plan was full of unduly optimistic bravado, and it lacked a key ingredient: cooperation with the county sheriff. Says Martin: “I remember thinking, ‘Is this still the BLM?’ ”

Two years later, in April 2014, when BLM law enforcement officers finally descended on Bundy’s ranch at Bunkerville, Nevada, Martin, by then retired, wasn’t surprised by the outcome. Wielding tasers and police dogs, the agency’s officers were confronted by protesters who had gathered in defense of Bundy. A video of the incident, showing a BLM ranger tasing one of Bundy’s sons, went viral, and dozens of Oath Keepers and other militia types from around the country flocked to Bunkerville to take on the federal “jack-booted thugs.” Two days later, a small line of flak-jacketed BLM rangers with assault rifles, backed up by similarly armed Park Service rangers, were strategically surrounded by the protesters, some pointing guns of their own. Local law enforcement was conspicuously absent until the standoff’s final moments, when the sheriff helped negotiate a truce and the agency backed down.

Today, Bundy’s cattle remain on the range, and the federal government has not brought charges against him. The defeat illustrates what Martin says he learned in his 24-year career with the BLM: Though the agency has given its rangers more modern equipment to handle the increasingly complex conflicts on public lands, it still has a surprisingly small and politically vulnerable presence on the Western range.

About 200 rangers — the term the BLM has always used to describe its field officers — enforce the agency’s regulations across the more than a quarter billion acres it manages in the West. That’s one ranger per an area larger than the state of Delaware. Veterans say that without significant backup support from local, state and other federal law enforcement, the BLM can’t possibly handle volatile conflicts like the one at Bunkerville, or the current standoff with armed protesters in eastern Oregon.

Before the Bundy showdown, the BLM asked the local sheriff for support, but decided to go it alone after failing to receive it. “That’s an attitude that just can’t work at BLM,” Martin says.

The BLM badged its first 13 rangers in 1978 for a specific purpose: To rein in illegal off-road vehicles in the California desert. They modeled themselves after Park Service rangers — brown wool trousers, khaki shirts and all — and carried only pistols. When the program expanded beyond California in the late ’80s, “everybody thought the rangers were about recreation management,” says Dennis McLane, who joined in 1979 and became the BLM’s first chief ranger in 1989. As the rangers trickled across the West, he says, they quickly confronted other crimes: archaeological looting, timber theft, illegal dumping.

But the agency rarely acted alone. Following the guidance of the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976, which granted the agency law enforcement authority, but emphasized “maximum feasible reliance upon local law enforcement,” BLM rangers routinely cooperated with county sheriffs, says Ed Patrovsky, who in the early ’90s was the first ranger sent to patrol 3.2 million acres of BLM land in northwest Colorado. “Without that,” he says, “doing much of any work would have been very difficult,” because of how thinly spread the new force was. In the BLM’s first major standoff with protestors, the 1990 shutdown of the notorious off-road race between Barstow, California, and Las Vegas, Nevada, the county sheriff played a key role, pursuing violators by helicopter.

As the West changed, so did the rangers. Bulging cities like Los Angeles and Las Vegas pushed urban crime onto the public land. Off-roading in the desert sometimes degenerated into drug- and alcohol-fueled riots with stabbings and other violent crime. “We were seeing more and more automatic weaponry,” says Cris Hartman, hired as a ranger in 1984. She recalls a series of controversial equipment upgrades: shotguns in the ’80s; semi-automatic rifles in 1992; and high-powered assault rifles in the early 2000s, after she’d left the BLM for the Forest Service, where she observed a similar pattern. Still, “the sheriffs were always ahead of us,” in terms of weaponry, she says.

The agency began hiring rangers who thought of themselves more as police officers. “We brought in people who told their buddies in Border Patrol or wherever else, ‘Hey, come to the BLM, there’s a lot of kick-ass stuff going on here,’ ” says Martin.

The shift on the ground reflected changes at the top. In the wake of 9/11, the agency peeled away its special agents — who specialize in long-term investigations — from civilian field managers and put them under the command of a newly created director position, filled by Bill Woody, who had never worked for the BLM. The number of agents increased, sometimes drawn from the ranks of the FBI and other traditional law enforcement agencies. Today, the agency has 75 agents, up nearly 50 percent from a decade ago, while the number of rangers has remained relatively steady.

The restructuring created “a faction within the agency,” says former BLM Director Bob Abbey. “I think, in many respects, they have become a separate organization.”

It also magnified certain personalities, by giving more autonomy to the “special agents in charge” who oversee consolidated regions. Martin is hesitant to name names, but like others critical of the direction that BLM law enforcement has taken, he clearly means Dan Love, the special agent for Utah and Nevada. Love spearheaded a series of busts of illegal artifact trading in southeast Utah in 2009. Locals denounced it as federal overreach, especially after an informant and two of the alleged traders committed suicide. Love also presided over the unexplained cancellation of cooperative agreements with sheriffs in several Utah counties. And he was the agent who briefed Martin and others in 2012, about the upcoming Bunkerville raid.

Has the BLM’s current leadership learned any lessons from Bunkerville? It’s hard to know because the agency has demonstrated a nearly complete unwillingness to discuss it with High Country News, or any other news organization. But retirees like Martin and Patrovsky hope the incident will help spur the agency to restrengthen its partnerships with local sheriffs and reconsider its own limits.

“We know there are a lot of people out there who don’t like us,” says Martin. That’s why he speculates that the local sheriff, whom Sagebrush Rebel-types tend to regard as the legitimate law of the land, may have been able to defuse the Bunkerville protest, had he been given the lead.

Rangers still have a simple, everyday mission to protect the public’s lands, and the BLM needs to promote that image, he says. In the past, “we weren’t marshals, we weren’t the FBI, ATF or DEA,” Martin says. “The public looked at us as rangers.”

Marshall Swearingen is a freelance reporter based in Livingston, Montana.

]]>No publisherSagebrush RebellionBureau of Land ManagementDepartment of InteriorJusticeNot on homepage2016/02/02 00:05:00 GMT-7ArticleA tale of two BLM mascotshttps://www.hcn.org/issues/48.1/a-tale-of-two-blm-mascots
Johnny Horizon and Seymour Antelope show the agency's changing focus.Revelers in Phoenix for the 2015 Super Bowl likely expected to see Blitz, the muscular blue bird that is the Seattle Seahawks’ mascot, along with Pat Patriot, the war-hero symbol of the rival New England Patriots.

But they weren’t prepared for the shorts-wearing pronghorn handing out bookmarks in front of a desert backdrop.

“People would say: ‘What is this? Who are you?’ We’d say, ‘This is Seymour Antelope. He’s the mascot of the Bureau of Land Management,’ “ recalls BLM spokesman Dennis Godfrey.

Forty years ago, then-BLM mascot Johnny Horizon was a fairly well-known presence; With his cowboy hat and rugged good looks, Johnny inspired a nationwide litter-cleanup campaign and all manner of consumer goods before quietly retiring in the late ’70s. Seymour emerged in 2008, when BLM New Mexico adopted him as a local mascot. In 2010, the agency made the ungulate the face of its youth programs nationwide — the closest thing to a mascot that it now has.

Johnny Horizon nodded to the BLM’s old guard of miners and ranchers even as the agency entered a new era of environmental concern. Seymour was born in another transitional period, as the BLM was given management of new national monuments, partly to infuse the agency with conservation values. If Seymour sticks around, it may be a clue that those values, too, have stuck — even as the BLM’s multiple-use mission becomes more complex than ever.

Photo: Seymour the Antelope high fives children at the Iditarod Ceremonial Start and Running of the Reindeer in 2012.

]]>No publisherBureau of Land ManagementArtInfographicHistoryDepartment of InteriorNot on homepage2016/01/25 01:10:00 GMT-7ArticleThe BLM has armed up since 1978, but it’s still outgunnedhttps://www.hcn.org/articles/bureau-of-land-management-outgunned-bundy-malheur-blm-sheriff
In confrontations with armed groups like the Bundy supporters, local law enforcement matters most. In 2012, Steve Martin sat in a briefing room at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Artesia, New Mexico, listening to the details of a clandestine operation his agency was planning in the Nevada desert. The goal seemed commendable — to round up rancher Cliven Bundy’s cattle, which had been grazing illegally on public land for decades — but the means seemed off to the Arizona-based special agent for the federal Bureau of Land Management. It was full of optimistic bravado, he recalls, and it was missing a key ingredient: cooperation with the county sheriff. Says Martin: “I remember thinking, ‘Is this still the BLM?’ ”

Two years later, in April 2014, when BLM law enforcement officers finally descended on Bundy’s ranch at Bunkerville, Nevada, Martin, by then retired, wasn’t surprised by the outcome. Wielding tasers and police dogs, the agency’s law enforcement officers found themselves confronted by protesters who had gathered in defense of Bundy. A video of the incident, including the tasing by a BLM ranger of one of Bundy’s sons, went viral, and dozens of Oath Keepers and other militia types from around the country flocked to Bunkerville to take on the federal “jack-booted thugs.” The following day, a small line of flak-jacketed BLM rangers with assault rifles, backed up by similarly armed Park Service rangers, were strategically surrounded by the protesters, some pointing guns of their own. Local law enforcement officers were conspicuously absent until the standoff's final moments, when the sheriff helped negotiate a truce and the agency backed down.

Today, Bundy’s cattle remain on the range, and the federal government has not brought charges against the rancher. The defeat illustrates what Martin says he learned in his 24-year career with the BLM: Though the agency has bulked up its rangers with more modern equipment to handle the increasingly complex conflicts on public lands, it still has a surprisingly small and politically vulnerable presence on the Western range.

About 200 rangers — the term the BLM has always used to describe its field officers — enforce the agency’s regulations across the more than a quarter billion acres it manages in the West. That’s one ranger per an area bigger than the state of Delaware. Law enforcement veterans say that without significant backup support from local, state and other federal law enforcement, it can’t succeed in handling volatile conflicts like the one at Bunkerville, or the current standoff with armed protesters in eastern Oregon.

Before the Bundy showdown, the BLM had contacted the local sheriff for support, but, failing to secure it, decided to go it alone. “That’s an attitude that just can’t work at BLM,” Martin says.

Bureau of Land Management law enforcement officers block the Overton Beach Road at the Lake Mead National Recreation Area near Overton, Nevada on April 10, 2014. The shadows of people protesting the roundup of cattle owned by Cliven Bundy are seen in the foreground.

John Locher/Las Vegas Review-Journal

The BLM badged its first 13 rangers in 1978for a specific purpose: To rein in illegal off-road vehicles in the California desert. They took their name and their look — brown wool trousers and khaki shirts — from Park Service rangers, and carried only pistols. Even as the program expanded beyond California in the late ’80s, “everybody thought the rangers were about recreation management,” says Dennis McLane, who became a ranger in 1979 and would become the BLM’s first chief ranger in 1989. As the rangers trickled across the West, he says, they quickly confronted other crimes: archaeological looting, timber theft, illegal dumping.

But the agency rarely acted alone. Following the guidance of the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976, which granted the agency law enforcement authority, but emphasized “maximum feasible reliance upon local law enforcement,” BLM rangers routinely cooperated with county sheriffs, says Ed Patrovsky, who in the early ’90s was the first ranger sent to patrol 3.2 million acres of BLM land in northwest Colorado. “Without that,” he says, “doing much of any work would have been very difficult,” because of how thinly spread the new force was. In the BLM’s first major standoff with protestors, the 1990 shutdown of the infamous off-road race between Barstow, California and Las Vegas, Nevada, the county sheriff played a key role, pursuing violators by helicopter.

As the West changed, so did the rangers. Bulging cities like Los Angeles and Las Vegas pushed urban crime onto the public land. Off-roading in the California desert sometimes degenerated into drug- and alcohol-fueled riots with stabbings and other violent crime. “We were seeing more and more automatic weaponry,” says Cris Hartman, hired as a ranger in 1987 1984. She recalls a series of controversial equipment upgrades: shotguns in the ’80s; semi-automatic rifles in 1992; high-powered assault rifles in the early 2000s, after she’d left the BLM for the Forest Service, where she observed a similar pattern. Still, “the sheriffs were always ahead of us,” in terms of weaponry, she says.

The agency also added special agents, who specialize in long-term investigations, to its ranger corps. And it began hiring rangers who thought of themselves more like police officers. “We brought in people who told their buddies in Border Patrol or wherever else, ‘Hey, come to the BLM, there’s a lot of kick-ass stuff going on here,’ ” says Martin.

The shift on the ground reflected structural changes from the top. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the agency peeled away the special agents from civilian field managers and put them under the command of a newly created director position, filled by Bill Woody, who had never worked for the BLM. The number of agents increased, sometimes drawn from the ranks of the FBI and other traditional law enforcement agencies. Today the agency has 75 agents, up nearly 50 percent from a decade ago, while the number of rangers has remained relatively steady.

The restructuring created “a faction within the agency,” says former BLM director Bob Abbey. “I think in many respects they have become a separate organization.”

It also magnified certain personalities, by giving more autonomy to special-agents-in-charge, who oversee consolidated regions. Martin is hesitant to use his name, but like many others critical of the direction that BLM law enforcement has taken, he clearly means Dan Love, the special-agent-in-charge for Utah and Nevada. Love spearheaded a series of busts of illegal artifact trading in southeast Utah in 2009. Locals cried federal overreach and were especially rankled when an informant and two of the alleged traders committed suicide. Love also presided over the inexplicable cancellation of cooperative agreements with sheriffs in several Utah counties. And he was the agent who briefed Martin and others in 2012, about the upcoming Bunkerville raid.

Has the BLM’s current leadership learned any lessons from Bunkerville? It’s hard to know because the agency has demonstrated a nearly total unwillingness to discuss it with High Country News, or any other news organization. But retirees like Martin and Patrovsky hope the incident will help spur the agency to restrengthen its partnerships with local sheriffs and reconsider its own limits.

“We know there are a lot of people out there who don’t like us,” says Martin. That’s why he speculates that the local sheriff, who Sagebrush Rebel-types tend to regard as the legitimate law of the land, may have been able to defuse the Bunkerville protest, had they been given the lead.

Rangers still have a simple, everyday mission to protect the public’s lands, and the BLM needs to promote that image, he says. In the past, “we weren’t Marshalls, we weren’t the FBI, ATF or DEA,” Martin says. “The public looked at us as rangers.”

Marshall Swearingen is a freelance reporter based in Bozeman, Montana.

]]>No publisherPublic LandsJusticeBureau of Land ManagementPoliticsSagebrush RebellionU.S. Forest ServiceGunsDepartment of Interior2016/01/07 10:10:00 GMT-7ArticleHigh Country News: Branching outhttps://www.hcn.org/issues/47.21/high-country-news-branching-out
The fourth in a series celebrating our 45th Anniversary.

“The Gangs of Zion” was the first issue of HCN as a full-color magazine.

HCN Archives

“The show was a reunion of sorts for young Pacific Islanders. ... Famously large, and often tattooed, the young men and women had roots in Tonga, Samoa, Hawaii and other Pacific Island groups. They crowded in with brothers, sisters and cousins, amping up for Dube’s outspoken lyrics and mellow backbeats.”

When HCN’s Aug. 8, 2005, cover story, “The Gangs of Zion,” described how a concert at Club Suede disintegrated into a brawl between two rival Salt Lake City gangs, some readers might have briefly imagined that they’d accidentally grabbed The New Yorker.

The story was something of a test, remembers publisher Paul Larmer, with its unusual subject and striking full-color photos of Polynesian gang members. It came not long after he and a new generation of staffers, including editor Greg Hanscom, turned the black-and-white newspaper into a full-color magazine. Could HCN stay true to itself, while evolving and expanding?

The year before, HCN took a similar risk, recalls contributing editor Michelle Nijhuis. In the early 2000s, scientists were increasingly sounding the alarm about human-caused climate change. Could HCN bring this abstract topic down to (Western) earth, even as most scientists were only beginning to link it to bark beetle invasions and deepening drought? Yes: Nijhuis wrote an award-winning series of science-based features that gave Westerners an unprecedented look at the already present and predicted effects of climate change on the region.

Staff members editing pages in 2001.

Michael Brands

HCN’s environmental coverage also branched out, tackling not only on-the-ground issues but the larger movement itself, with contrarian headlines like: “Where were the environmentalists when Libby (Montana) needed them most?” And HCN added firepower to our website in 2003, when we hired our first Web master, future bestselling science fiction author Paolo Bacigalupi. Paolo started HCN’s first blog and later penned our first fictional cover story — a futuristic tale of bounty hunters who slash tamarisk from riverbanks to survive in a water-strapped West.

The West’s public land, water and wildlife remained HCN’s main focus, but after “The Gangs of Zion” hit the newsstands, readers no longer were startled to find profiles of anarchistic RV communities in the Arizona desert, billboard corporations in Salt Lake City, or Muslim meatpackers in Colorado. These stories grapple with the ways that the West’s diverse communities — including the Polynesian immigrants lured to Utah by Mormon missionaries — confront, again and again, the question of how to live in an ever-changing region.

]]>No publisherHistoryNot on homepage2015/12/07 03:05:00 GMT-7ArticleHigh Country News: The reopeninghttps://www.hcn.org/issues/47.20/high-country-news-the-reopening
The third in a series celebrating our 45th anniversary.“Today, the rural West is as wide open as any 19th century mining or ranching town ... in precisely the sense of those old movie-set towns: Law and order have been broken down. Because this is the late 20th century, people are not shot in the streets. ... Today’s West is wide open in ways too subtle for an episode of Gunsmoke.”

Ed Marston wrote this in 1988 to introduce a four-part HCN series called “The Reopening of the Western Frontier.” Five years previously, there was a different kind of reopening, when the HCN board of directors hired Ed and his wife, Betsy, to run the paper, and High Country News moved from Lander, Wyoming, to Paonia, Colorado (the Marstons’ home) in the back of a pickup truck.

The West’s traditional economy was in crisis in the early ’80s. Oil prices tumbled, and Denver office towers hollowed out. Beef prices slumped. Even Paonia dwindled, as two nearby coal mines closed.

The “reopening” involved the idea of a New West, based on the non-extractive values of the public land. The Marstons were intrigued by the region’s vast public lands, perhaps because they saw the West with fresh eyes. Ed had been a college physics professor and Betsy a TV journalist in New York City, before they moved to Colorado in 1974.

Ed and Betsy Marston outside the High Country News office in Paonia, Colorado in 1990.

At first, HCN struggled, but as the Marstons gained understanding of Western issues and recruited freelance and staff writers from across the region, the paper grew stronger. Its circulation climbed; it even created a financial reserve.

A four-part HCN series in 1986, called “Western Water Made Simple,” untangled the subtleties of water management in the West’s three major river basins, winning a prestigious national prize. HCN sought middle ground in the grazing conflict, profiling progressive ranchers. Ed Marston could be provocative, too, saying the Forest Service should be abolished because it refused to adapt to a world beyond tree-cutting. By 1990, HCN had become almost cool, with Rolling Stone and People magazine touting the little paper with the large ambitions.

As HCN entered the digital age, Marston’s ’88 intro remained relevant. He’d warned readers not to expect a Gunsmoke-style dramatic ending. “The outcome of the reopening,” as he said, “will not be known for decades.”

]]>No publisherHistoryArchiveNot on homepageDear Friends2015/11/23 01:05:00 GMT-7ArticleHigh Country News: Tragedy and transitionhttps://www.hcn.org/issues/47.19/high-country-news-tragedy-and-transition
The second in a series celebrating our 45th anniversaryThe horse appeared on the highway in the darkness “with all the feral dignity of a grenade,” remembers Dan Whipple. It was August 1978, and Whipple and three other HCN staff members were returning home to Lander, Wyoming, after a concert — Beethoven’s 9th Symphony.

The car swerved to dodge the horse and careened off the road. HCN editor Justas Bavarskis died instantly; the three others lay badly injured in the silent night. Hours passed; a lone coyote was the only passerby.

Whipple nearly died, and spent days in the hospital. Reflecting on the accident in 1989, he describes Bavarskis’ death as “so tragic that ... I can’t construct any meaning to it.” But he and the other HCN staffers — Marjane Ambler and Jazmyn McDonald — were deeply moved when readers donated over $30,000 toward their medical bills.

Justas Bavarskis, former HCN editor, taking a break.

Lorna Wilkes

Even before the accident, HCN was in transition. An energy boom was roaring across the West, and “many of the abstract problems High Country News had earlier warned about had become real,” former HCN editor Joan Nice wrote in 1989. “Most of the big dailies in the West had their own environmental reporters. Did the region still need HCN? Maybe, we decided, if it became more lively, provocative and perceptive.”

Bavarskis — a seasoned writer with a sharp wit — had those qualities. Ambler recalled how he “sloshed through ankle-deep mud in a uranium mine” and pursued leads at the union bar. The accident that killed him occurred just a few short months after he arrived.

So Geoffrey O’Gara stepped in as editor. He stretched HCN’s environmental news into more literary terrain, improved the tabloid’s design and appearance, raised salaries and bought new typesetting equipment. He also solidified HCN’s nonprofit model, establishing a board of directors and acquiring tax-exempt status- — a rare and complicated legal move at the time.

HCN staff in the early ’80s, from left, Jill Bamberg, Carol Jones, designer Kathy Bogan, who redesigned the newspaper, and Dan Whipple.

Mike McClure

Nice stepped back from HCN after having a child. When O’Gara moved on to broadcast journalism, Whipple took over, though a year later, in 1983, he decided to leave as well. He told the board of directors that he knew of nobody in Lander able to lead the newspaper onward. HCN now stood on the threshold of its greatest transition — the move to Paonia, Colorado.

Read more about Justas Bavarskis and the accident, plus articles from the HCN archives selected by Geoffrey O’Gara and Dan Whipple to highlight their time at HCN.

]]>No publisherHistoryDear FriendsNot on homepage2015/11/09 02:00:00 GMT-7ArticleHigh Country News: Origins https://www.hcn.org/issues/47.18/high-country-news-origins
The first in a series celebrating our 45th anniversary“The days shorten. Hills turn sere and brown. Dried cases of the stonefly stick lifelessly to the exposed boulders; streams once brimming flow low and clear. ... As seasons swing, I suppose it is only natural that our thoughts turn inward and back.”

Tom Bell — a Lander, Wyoming, rancher, wildlife biologist and World War II combat veteran — wrote this for the “Fall Fishing Issue” of High Country News in 1970. A year earlier, he’d purchased Camping News Weekly, a small newspaper geared toward hunters and anglers. Soon afterward, he renamed it, creating a new kind of publication that has endured for 45 years.

Bell loved the natural world and initially preserved much of Camping News’ outdoor flavor. But his vision for the paper — as a voice for the nascent environmental movement — was already clear: A recipe for leftover roast elk sandwiches would appear next to a strongly worded column about timber legislation.

For the next few years, Bell and a shoestring staff did what other newspapers refused to do — announced important wilderness hearings and mining proposals, scolded the governor for cozying up to industry, shamed local ranchers for killing eagles and fencing in pronghorn.

His views weren’t terribly popular in Wyoming, and the paper — with only a few thousand subscribers — struggled. Bell, who earned almost nothing, eventually sold his ranch and moved his family into a small house in town. He made High Country News a nonprofit in 1971, and asked readers for extra support. But it wasn’t enough; in 1973, he announced that HCN was closing shop.

High Country News founder Tom Bell in 1984 and his article about eagle poachers from 1972.

Mike McClure/HCN Archives

In one of the highlights of HCN history, money poured in from readers, and the paper survived. Bell called it a miracle, and printed the donors’ names in a centerspread — a tradition that lives on today as the Research Fund.

Shortly before Bell left HCN in 1974 — exhausted by the constant deadline grind — he hired two young editors, Joan Nice and Bruce Hamilton. When a wave of energy development hit Wyoming, the duo wrote sharp-eyed stories about strip mining, oil shale and their effects on small-town communities. Marjane Ambler, another young editor, joined that same year, bringing an interest in Native American issues.

Together, through the mid-’70s, they secured HCN as a solid environmental news source and expanded its reach across the Rocky Mountains.

]]>No publisherHistoryDear FriendsNot on homepage2015/10/26 14:44:42 GMT-6ArticleA look back on 45 years of HCNhttps://www.hcn.org/articles/45-anniverary
Continuing the tradition of in-depth, passionate coverage of the West’s defining issues.Origins and early years

Tom Bell didn't shy from confronting eagle poachers and others whom he viewed as hell-bent on environmental destruction. In this issue's editorial, he writes: "I repeat ... when will justice be served?" These days, still living in Lander, he's riled up about human-caused climate change. Read "The Shame of It!" by Tom Bell, November 24, 1972.

Joan Nice Hamilton, HCN editor from 1973 to 1981, recalls this article (written by her husband Bruce Hamilton, HCN editor from 1973 to 1977) as an example of the local perspective that HCN brought to the 1970s energy crisis, a national issue that was one of HCN's staple topics. Many ranchers in the Tongue River area continue to fight coal mines, which are looking to Asia to expand their market.Read "Coal Conflict on Tongue River" by Bruce Hamilton, August 30, 1974

Much of HCN's reporting in the '70s fit squarely in a growing environmental awareness, but achieved an uncommon level of detail and analysis. This investigative article into the side effects of the herbicide 2,4,5-T (a component of the military exfoliant Agent Orange) "was really groundbreaking for 1978," says Marjane Ambler, who was associate editor from 1974 to 1980. News coverage like this likely played a role in the EPA's 1985 decision to terminate all use of the herbicide. Read "Side Effects of Herbicide Shake EPA" by Justas Bavarskis, February 24, 1978.

HCN made an early effort to give voice to those often left out of other forums, says Joan Nice Hamilton, citing this article about a Montana tribe's fight against coal strip mining on their land — an example of the struggle that many Western tribes continue to face while balancing traditional values with development of natural resources.Read "Northern Cheyenne Fight Again for Land" by Marjane Ambler, October 11, 1974

High Country News founder Tom Bell in 1984 and his article about eagle poachers from 1972.

Mike McClure/HCN Archives

Tragedy and transition

When four HCN staff members were returning to Lander, Wyoming, in August 1978 following a performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, the driver, Justas Bavarskis, swerved to miss a horse on the road. The car careened into the ditch, killing Bavarskis and seriously injuring the others. The tragedy — made bittersweet when readers donated $30,000 to cover medical bills — marked a period of transition for HCN. Many of the West's daily newspapers were now covering environmental issues, and as HCN editors strove to find a niche, they pushed for a redesign of the newspaper's format and emphasized more literary writing.

Justas Bavarskis, former HCN editor, taking a break.

Lorna Wilkes

HCN staff in the early ’80s, from left, Jill Bamberg, Carol Jones, designer Kathy Bogan, who redesigned the newspaper, and Dan Whipple.

Mike McClure

Geoffrey O'Gara, HCN editor from 1979 to 1982, broadened the scope of HCN writing to include in-depth, personal essays like this one, in which author Don Snow reflects on his roots in Utah — "the most painfully beautiful place in the world." HCN revisited the central theme — the relationship between Utah's Mormon culture and its economy — in a 2012 cover story by Jonathan Thompson, "Red State Rising."Read "Squeezing the daylights out of Zion" by Don Snow, July 25, 1980

Dan Whipple, who served as HCN editor in 1982-83 and was on the staff from the late '70s, recalls the importance of HCN's coverage of the West's nuclear issues — something few other publications were covering at the time. Here, he writes about the proposal to house 100 MX nuclear missiles at the F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming. Although international treaties lead to retirement of the powerful MX missiles by 2005, other Western communities continue to live alongside nuclear weapons, and perhaps still fit Whipple's description of having "a pronounced indifference to the destructive potential in their midst."Read "All MXed up in Cheyenne" by Dan Whipple, December 10, 1982

Whipple also points to a 1982 issue about bioregionalism, which posits that society, at various levels, could structure itself around characteristics of the natural landscape. The concept has faded somewhat over the decades, but still shapes attitudes toward the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, for instance. C.L. Rawlins writes in one essay: "I can barely comprehend the world as an entirety ... But, at the very least, this place and my acceptance of it give me some firm ground for my feet."Read "Everybody has to be someplace" by C.L. Rawlins, December 24, 1982

The reopening

In 1983, HCN moved to Paonia, Colorado from Lander, Wyoming, in the back of a pickup. The board of directors had handed the newspaper over to Ed Marston, a former college physics professor, and wife Betsy, a former TV journalist, both New York City transplants. The Marstons were fascinated with the West's landscape and culture, and they quickly set to tackling the region's complex issues, aided by a growing cadre of freelance and staff writers. The '80s marked a period of crisis and deindustrialization for the West's traditional economy — a development that Ed Marston called the "reopening" of the Western frontier.

Ed and Betsy Marston outside the High Country News office in Paonia, Colorado in 1990.

In the early '90s, HCN turned its attention to public lands grazing. Environmental groups tended to favor reducing or eliminating grazing on Forest Service and BLM lands, because of the harm to watersheds, the spread of weeds and the reduction in forage for other wildlife. When Ed Marston met Doc and Connie Hatfield — ranchers who were using progressive techniques in an attempt to restore watersheds — he and other HCN writers explored and advocated this approach as a way of protecting ecologically valuable private and public lands while keeping rural communities intact. Read "A neighborly approach to sustainable public-land grazing," by Ed Marston, March 23, 1992

These stories appeared just as the friction between ranchers and environmentalists was reignited by the Clinton Administration, whose Interior Secretary, Bruce Babbitt, sought to give citizens outside the ranching business more say over grazing management and to increase the fees ranchers pay to lease forage on the public lands. HCN covered Babbitt's contentious meetings in the West, and his retreat from some of the reforms.Read "Babbitt cedes grazing reform to Congress," by Tony Davis, January 23, 1995

Toward the end of the Clinton administration, HCN covered the President's bold use of the 1906 Antiquities Act to administratively create tens of millions of acres of protected national monuments in the West – moves which pleased environmentalists struggling to get an increasingly reluctant Congress to create new wilderness areas, and angered local leaders who saw them as federally imposed land grabs. Read "Beauty and the Beast: The President's new monument forces Utah to face its tourism future," by Paul Larmer, April 14, 1997

Branching out

HCN Archives

In the summer of 2003, new publisher Paul Larmer, a 10-year veteran of the editorial department, and a new generation of HCN staffers turned the black-and-white newspaper into a full-color magazine and expanded the HCN website. The 2005 cover story "Gangs of Zion" showed HCN branching in new directions as it explored the West's diverse communities. In 2006, HCN published its first fictional cover story, "The Tamarisk Hunter." And, of course, many articles — including an award-winner feature about pronghorn migration, "Perilous Passages" and classic water stories like "New Hope for the Delta"— centered on HCN's most enduring themes: the West's public land, water and wildlife.

In 2004, human-caused climate change wasn't yet making daily headlines, but its global significance was beginning to be realized. Michelle Nijhuis remembers discussions among fellow editors: could HCN find a Western angle into this massive topic, even though many scientists were hesitant to link local phenomena like bark beetle outbreaks to the bigger warming trend? She found several scientists willing to take the risk, and their predictions have proven prescient. (In addition to the main link below, the series included "Written in the Rings," "What happened to winter?""The Ghosts of Yosemite," and "Save Our Snow." Read "Global Warming's Unlikely Harbingers" by Michelle Nijhuis, July 19, 2004

The 2000s also brought an unprecedented oil and gas boom, spurred by $100/barrel oil prices and new hydro-fracking technology that allowed producers to tap new reservoirs of hydrocarbons. HCN found new angles into the story, including profiles of the Ute Indian tribe, whose investments in energy development has made it one of the richest tribes in the nation, and the mixed fortunes of the three tribes that sit near the center of North Dakota's Bakken fields. Read "The Other Bakken Boom"by Sierra Crane Murdoch, April 23, 2012

As HCN branched into new subjects, it also expanded its geographic scope, documenting an increasingly globalized West. The region, long regarded as a resource colony for the rest of the county, had become a resource colony for the world, as well as a new home for displaced people from around the globe. Read "The Global West" by Jonathan Thompson, July 24, 2011

]]>No publisherWildlifeBirdsEndangered SpeciesPoliticsBureau of Land ManagementU.S. Forest ServiceU.S. Fish & WildlifeAgricultureEnergy & IndustryCommunitiesRanchingInfographic2015/08/17 03:10:00 GMT-6ArticleDispatch from White Hope Mine dispute in Montanahttps://www.hcn.org/articles/dispatch-from-oath-keepers-security-op-in-montana
The constitutionalist group Oath Keepers is defending a mine that the Forest Service says is out of compliance. The man's stare seeths with anger. He is bearded, maybe 35 years old, slightly overweight but powerful, wearing a camouflage baseball cap with a faded American flag patch. To his right is another large man, arms crossed. To his left, a diminutive young woman, dressed head to toe in camo and wearing a large knife on her hip, is filming my every move.

All three are blocking my advance beyond a Forest Service gate that they or their comrades have used to bar the road. They believe they are defending land that is private — a small mining claim for copper, zinc, silver and traces of gold held by George Kornec and Phil Nappo — but that the Forest Service says is national forest.

I ask how their day is going, what they have been up to. The middleman snaps back: "We cannot discuss that with you." The stare.

Welcome to the standoff at the White Hope Mine.

My day started in the tiny town of Lincoln, about 20 miles from the mine, in the ponderosa country of western Montana. I arrived on Aug. 10, five days after the Oath Keepers — a group of mostly former law enforcement and military members who claim to defend the Constitution — issued a call for "all American patriots" to join in "Operation Big Sky" and "help save our country" by defending the miners against the Forest Service. Two related groups, Idaho Three Percenters and the Pacific Patriot Network, joined in.

I stopped at the Forest Service ranger station on the edge of town and began to piece together the agency's story: In 1986, the miners missed a renewal deadline for their claim, which had been worked since the 1920s. They had to file a new claim, which fell under the 1955 Multiple Surface Use Act instead of the more lenient 1872 Mining Law. Thereafter, the Forest Service required the miners to have an approved operating plan, which they did until 2014. At that time, the agency raised concerns about the miners' construction of an unapproved shed and their cutting of firewood.

The arrival of the Oath Keepers "was unexpected," says regional Forest Service spokesman David Smith. The agency held meetings with the miners as recently as July 30 to discuss bringing the claim into compliance. "Our objective is to continue working with (the miners) so they can resume their operation," Smith says.

I hung out in town, waiting to meet with Mary Emerick, a spokesperson for the Oath Keepers. A lone man in camo walked the main street. I got a hamburger, and the waitress told me a few of the operatives just finished brunch. "They are only here to do good," she said.

Emerick invited me to the Hotel Lincoln and we sat on the back patio overlooking ponderosas. Last week she drove all night from her home in southern Oregon to get here. She and others here participated in a similar scuffle with the Bureau of Land Management at the Sugar Pine Mine in her home state in April. The current standoff fits into a growing trend in which Oath Keepers and related groups are called in to battle federal agencies during Western public lands disputes.

She explained that with Operation Big Sky, the Oath Keepers dispute the 1986 claim lapse, and that the Forest Service has unlawfully threatened the miners. But she would not provide evidence of either, saying it would compromise their legal case. Her description of the day-to-day operation was also evasive. How many people are defending the claim? "That's a security issue." Rough number? "We have the capability to expand it."

I wanted to see the operatives in action, but it's complicated. Montana's Department of Environmental Quality is overseeing a major reclamation of a larger, unrelated mine nearby. The project involves hauling hundreds of cubic yards of mine tailings with a steady stream of heavy trucks on the same roads that lead to the White Hope Mine. To accommodate the trucks, the Forest Service has closed the roads to the public, granting an exception to the miners. As a journalist, I arranged for a similar variance and an escort (something the operatives, in another bit of lawlessness, have not done).

At the access road, I hopped in the pickup of Shellie Haaland, who oversees the reclamation project. She voiced concerns that the Oath Keeper's scuffle could turn into something larger and more disruptive, possibly resulting in layoffs for the 30-plus people working the trucks and other equipment if law enforcement were to assume a major presence here. She drove me through the maze of roads and dropped me at the gate.

The operatives forcefully tell me to not take photos. They will not tell me their names. The man with the angry stare has a radio, and it crackles to life. He answers with a radio handle of "Warthog," or maybe War Hog — he won't say.

Self-described constitutional rights activists confer Wednesday, Aug. 5, 2015, in Lincoln, Mont. According to retired U.S. Army Sgt. Maj. Jospeh Santoro the Oath Keepers and other constitutionalist groups are protecting the rights of the White Hope Mine claimants.

Thom Bridge/The Independent Record/AP

For about ten minutes, our talk revolves around a theme: I ask questions, and mostly War Hog answers in various ways that they will not answer. At one point, I proffer a pocket-sized copy of the Constitution, hoping to spark a real conversation. The stare.

Then, George Kornec, slightly stooped with age, comes walking slowly down the road. He is flanked by a muscular and tattooed man with a black Oath Keepers t-shirt. Kornec lives on the claim and does not own a telephone. He's known for having a sharp wit and a trove of local knowledge.

His eyes twinkle. He lights a cigarette. The unnamed Oath Keeper speaks for him: "George's position is that anything beyond this gate is trespassing." They turn and walk away.

Editor's Note: On Aug. 11, federal prosecutors filed suit against the miners in U.S. District Court in Helena, in response to the dispute. The Missoulian reported that the suit seeks a declaration that the miners "illegally opened a road, cut down trees, built a garage and denied the public the right to access the White Hope mine near Lincoln."

]]>No publisherRecreationInfographicPublic LandsWildernessNational Park ServiceOutdoor Rec Special IssueNot on homepage2015/07/20 02:05:00 GMT-6ArticleA timeline of the Antiquities Acthttps://www.hcn.org/issues/47.9/john-podesta-legacy-maker/monumental-timeline
The presidential power tool for land conservation since Teddy Roosevelt.